Semi-related to progress bars and spinners, I think my newest Internet pet peeve is a page that says "No results" for a fetch action like searching while the results are loading with no indication that loading is happening.
>This was made in 1990, sponsored by the ACM CHI 1990 conference, to tell the history of widgets up until then. Previously published as: Brad A. Myers. All the Widgets. 2 hour, 15 min videotape. Technical Video Program of the SIGCHI'90 conference, Seattle, WA. April 1-4, 1990. SIGGRAPH Video Review, Issue 57. ISBN 0-89791-930-0.
Brad is well known for his many projects named after gemstone and rock acronyms:
>But probably the Garnet tool with the most unusual acronym is C32, which I won't read. C32 is a spreadsheet interface for defining and debugging Garnet's constraints. A story about C32 it it started off of C29 when I submitted it to UIST, and it got rejected. So I fixed a couple things, added three more C's, and it flew through the CHI'91 referee process.
I sympathize with your pet peeve! Here are some of the other groundbreaking ideas Preston Rockwell III invented for Sentient User Interfaces as a Service (SUIAAS), that may sooth your pain and frustration while entertaining you:
- Sentient Error Messages that apologize in haikus:
"File not found, friend / Like my purpose in this world / 404 sorry"
- Conscious CAPTCHAs that question their own existence:
"Prove you're not a robot by helping me understand if I am one"
- Self-aware 404 pages that redirect users to therapy:
"This page doesn't exist. Neither do most of our hopes. Let's talk."
- Loading screens that perform Shakespeare during quantum computing:
"To load or not to load, that is the quantum superposition"
> - Self-aware 404 pages that redirect users to therapy: "This page doesn't exist. Neither do most of our hopes. Let's talk."
Sounds pretty nihilistic. I should make my website give messages like that for all the error status codes.403
400 Bad Request: Your input is as malformed as the cosmos: a chaotic scattering of atoms that never had a chance of making sense, yet still clings to the illusion of order.
401 Unauthorized: Access denied. You stand before an indifferent gatekeeper, credentials in hand, only to learn the universe never planned to let you in—or anyone else, for that matter.
403 Forbidden: You are forbidden—not because of who you are, but because meaning itself is forbidden. The door is locked, the key is mist, the destination a rumor.
404 Not Found: The page is missing; so are most of our aspirations, our childhood dreams, and every unfulfilled promise whispering through the empty corridors of memory.
405 Method Not Allowed: Wrong approach. But in a universe where every path leads to entropy, can any method truly be ‘allowed’?
500 Internal Server Error: The machinery within has collapsed under its own meaninglessness—much like every grand plan that preceded it.
That's a 404. Archive.org doesn't even have it.
After Googling, seems the correct link is https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/who-made-that-pr...
https://web.archive.org/web/20140307182222/https://www.nytim...
Semi-related to progress bars and spinners, I think my newest Internet pet peeve is a page that says "No results" for a fetch action like searching while the results are loading with no indication that loading is happening.